SOS Forests

The findings are eye-opening. Forest fires in California in 2007 produced 3 to 4 times more air pollutants than all the passenger cars in the state produced over the entire year.

If every passenger car in Calif. was parked in the garage for the entire year, it would have had little effect on air pollution, since the fires alone produced many times more CO2, CH4, and N2O.

Since Calif. has many times more autos than any other western state, and other western states had more acres burned in 2007 than Calif., the ratio of air pollutants from fires to that of autos was magnitudes larger in the other states.

Is any of this sinking in yet?

If you wish to ban automobiles because of the pollution they cause, then you should also wish to ban forest fires, since forest fires are much more polluting than cars.

If you think cars are causing global warming, then you ought to look at the GHG outpourings of forest fires.

A typical wildfire acre produces GHG’s roughly equivalent to driving 10 cars all year. Last year, and the year before, roughly 10 million acres burned in wildfires. That’s the air pollution equivalent of 100 million cars driven all year each year.

That does not include the water pollution, wildlife mortality, habitat destruction, forest incineration and conversion to brush, thousands of homes burned, enormous costs, etc., of wildfires.

Is the Big Picture taking shape yet? Is everybody finally getting the message? Anybody?

Thanks for the info. I hope Dr.Bonnicksen wouldn’t mind if his FCEM Report No.2 were copied and handed to the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Committee debating what to do in the aftermath of the Angora Fire re: burned tree removal and avoiding another similar catastrophe here in the Tahoe Basin. (If it hasn’t been done already)

Comments from the Sierra Club still tow the party line: Let it grow, let it burn, and let it rot. And may have swayed the committee to an upcoming re-vote of recommendations made by professionals providing solutions.

This document should enlighten the panel to endorse an aggressive forest restoration policy that is both good for people and the environment.

We shall see.

I am sure he would welcome dissemination, for whatever good it will do.

BINGO’s rule. Don’t you know that it’s your own fault if the Sierra Club burns your house down?

Blue Ribbon!!! Pin a medal on the morons.

Thanks for reminding me Mike. BINGO’s RULE SUPREME. From what I heard, even Bonnicksen got slammed at one of the meetings.

Sorry, my head has turned to mush from banging against a BINGO BRICK WALL for years. I have a big headache as the forests and friends’ homes around me burn.

Yes, time for a reality check:

No salvage logging or proper restoration on Angora.

No mechanical thinning on thousands of acres in Tahoe ripe for even a greater disaster.

Years of litigation attempting either of the above.

Got it.

So now I only have a few choices remaining:

1) I could sign-up for one of their re-education camps and become blissfully unaware of the past, present and future.

2) Build an underground concrete bunker many miles away before their thinking surrounds me once again.

3) Throw in the towel, watch the West burn, baby burn, and say “This could have been prevented.”

Hope at least I get a “Blue Ribbon” too, for being a good student under Scenario #1.

The arrogance of fools is a tough thing to deal with. People who are not qualified to shine Tom Bonnicksen’s shoes are the first to proclaim they know better, based upon nothing but obeisance to other fools. They live in wooden houses and rail against logging. They own 3 or 4 cars and bemoan fossil fuels. They are demanding, accusatory, condemnatory, and yet provide no service to anyone or anything. They purport affection for wild animals over their own children and neighbors. They put rings in their own noses and are led like oxen, all the while proclaiming their independence of thought. They see intricate conspiracies where none exist, yet cannot tie their own shoes.

But arrogant fools, loud though they might be, are in no way a majority. Remember that, Tallac. Most of your neighbors and all of your friends are much wiser and more compassionate than the braying jackasses. You are far from alone. The battle is not yet lost, and may even be going our way. Hang in there.

I noticed in news stories about Mr. Bonnicksen study that it was not peer reviewed and the study was funded by a foundation that gets money from logging companies. Also, some other experts who were interviewed for a story said Bonnicksen’s estimates were on the high end. Seems like you folks had a problem with a certain study out of OSU that wasn’t peer reviewed so I’m wondering why you are fine with this latest Bonnicksen study not being peer reviewed?

Depending on the peers, many global warming studies are peer reviewed and that just compounds the bogus ideas they promote.

The inherent problem with science these days is the dependency on politicized funding.

Politicized funding can take on many forms, but I am suspect of all studies that conclude foolish repercussions when the scope of the study was minute.

If global warming was really happening, and if it more importantly was really being caused by man, the solutions for it would not include only restrictions on western nations and developed countries.

If environmentalists were ever serious about saving anything, they would work toward solutions that actually would effect the end goal of saving whatever they say they seek to save, rather than watching the forests turn to ashes and coming up with a bogus claim that this is good for the forest and the people and wildlife who live around it.

I do not forgive the ‘let’s burn it up’ crowd for a veritable plethora of reasons, but we can start today with this crowd explaining to me why it is that when the mountains quickly get smaller this spring during runoff and my salmon streams fill with mud, why this is somehow good for an endangered species that will come back to these streams only find unsuitable habitat to continue their species. Let’s begin there. Let’s forget about the seared ground, sterile environment for a minute and let’s just focus on the salmon. The salmon I’m talking about make it over nine federal dams, travel 700 to 800 miles back to Idaho and what do they get to see when they return.

They get to see that while they were away, their birthplace was buried in sediment all because it was supposedly a good thing to let the forest be incinerated. And you want to talk about logging companies?

In this particular instance there was an overcorrection due to some poor practices in the 60s, the pendulum swung too violently the other way and what did we get, a lack of timber receipts, so our local taxes get to skyrocket, and now we get a worse effect than we had in the 60s when a logging company took too much.

There’s this place in the middle, where people get to have a healthy forest that experiences low intensity fires, wood is harvested and used to build those unnecessary things in life like a house, costs go down because it is produced locally and it limits transportation costs.

The Eco Nazis get to enjoy the forest too, instead of lying to themselves that a blackened landscape and a choked river are beautiful things. And they get the added bogus bonus of believing the earth might be saved because the creation of lumber happened locally and was only transported a few miles rather than across the sea and over several borders.

Now when you get that, you get back to me.

Until then, I will be sitting on the banks of this river wondering where in the hell all my damn salmon have gone.

Joe:

The good news is that steelhead were still trying to spawn in the Toutle when it was so warm and still choked from ash from Mt. St. Helens that all the fish biologists said they had died. And I suspect Spirit Lake may be teeming with fish again at this time, if it had been re-stocked in some common sense manner.

The bad news is everything else you said, plus you are probably still right about the Idaho salmon runs this year.

It is just not the crazy-ass Enviros that are trying to lie to themselves about the “beauty” of millions of unintended and unexpected dead trees and thousands of mud-infested streams, it is also the USFS bureaucrats that like to call themselves “resource managers” and the bogus scientists, money-grubbing “environmental” lawyers, and ego-inflated judges who have conspired to create this mess.

It is a national shame, a degrading and costly waste of local and regional resources, and ugly as shit to boot.

If it wasn’t for Mike’s blog, there would be no place to whine, and very few to whine to. Something has to be done, and I believe we are all doing our best to figure out what that might be.

Things are no different in western Oregon than in Idaho, except we have more misinformed voters in our urban areas.